Among the emails encouraging me to buy Viagra and watches lands an invitation to "our B&B with six-acre prairie garden on our small farm in West Sussex". The website is a vision in pink petals. Curiosity gets the better of me. What is a prairie garden exactly, and why is there one near the South Downs?
An Easter wreath of little eggs and feathers hangs on the door in welcome at Morlands Farm in Henfield, home to Sussex Prairies. If this is modern farmhouse style, bring it on, I think, as Pauline McBride takes me to the Red room. Either side of a contemporary four-poster, two fat table lamps sit on a pair of oriental cabinets used as bedside tables. Richly coloured rugs and kilims cover the floor, tiny Hindu paintings hang above a high-backed sofa, and a pair of stools are piled with Taschen interiors books. I could happily load up a Pickfords van with the entire contents and drive it home.
The bathroom has a shower over the bath, plenty of toiletries and a window, the tea tray, a coffee pot and a teapot (with mini cable-stitch cosy), and homemade chocolate-walnut biscuits. There is just one tiny fly in the ointment – I simply cannot get my bedroom door to shut.
Nosily, I stick my head into a Yellow twin and smaller Blue double (both immaculate, both empty) on the way down. There is no guest sitting room but each bedroom has a sitting area – mine having the largest.
What's all this prairie stuff then, I ask over a cup of tea with Pauline and husband Paul – and get the story. It was in Luxembourg, where the couple spent 12 years employed on a country estate, that horticulturist Paul began working with Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf. The Dutchman is a luminary of what the gardening world calls the New Wave planting movement, characterised, they tell me, by romantic clouds of strong coloured perennials and ornamental grasses.
Inspired, the McBrides wanted their own "prairie" project, and moved back to Pauline's childhood home – Morlands Farm – to create the garden and build this new farmhouse. The B&B opened last October – but before that, they planted up their prairie on several acres out back. One spring weekend, after they had positioned some 30,000 pots, they invited family and friends to "The Big Plant".
"Everyone came to help," says Pauline. "They were camping or brought caravans, and we had to sound a klaxon at mealtimes."
Since then, Sussex Prairies has been described by one gardening writer as one of the most exciting new British gardens to open to the public. Some of the taller grasses grow to three metres and the snaking bark pathways enable visitors to get right in among the Jerusalem sage, saponaria, day lilies, ornamental alliums, red-hot pokers and something intriguingly called African love grass.
Of course it is all still a long way off its full summer glory; a small topiary garden beyond the sun-terrace is laden with hoar frost the next morning. Breakfast is a sumptuous feast of homemade yoghurt, fruit salad and deep yellow eggs from Sussex hens (food distance measured in metres rather than miles here). By the time you read this though, the ewes will be lambing, and it won't be long before the prairie garden bursts into life for another season.
• Wheatsheaf Road, Henfield (01273 495 902, sussexprairies.co.uk). Doubles £95 and £125 a night, twin room £110, B&B. Guests have the run of the garden, otherwise guided garden visits for groups by arrangement, or check website for opening times and dates.
Lunch and a pint
The Royal Oak (01444 881252) at Wineham, near Henfield, is an ancient pub down a country lane, with as many timbers as a galleon on the outside and an informal beer garden outside. The beer is really the thing: it is served direct from barrels behind a quirky little bar. Inside the pub is all uneven brick floors, with a massive inglenook fireplace for chilly nights. It's half an hour's walk from Henfield via bridleways and footpaths, passing cottages and farmsteads. If you enjoy the pub's delicious sausages and colcannon with cider and onion gravy, meander over to Partridge Green (five minutes by car) to SK Hutchings Family Butchers and Graziers (High Street, 01403 710209) which sells local quality meats, for some bangers to take home. This is the butcher who creates our breakfast sausages and smoked bacon – from our own pigs.
Pauline and Paul McBride, owners of Sussex Prairies B&B
Step back in time
The best way to work off those calories is to scale the South Downs. To reach the Iron Age hill fort of Chanctonbury Ring, skirt the shopping delights of the village of Steyning (The French House is a must for interiors bits) and at the hamlet of Wiston turn right and head up the hill past Tolkien-esque tree formations. From the summit you can see the Sussex Weald stretching into the distance. The Ring itself is a mysterious place – the wizened trees are said to be the petrified forms of ancient witches, and only a fool would consider walking widdershins (anti-clockwise) around its circumference, as that will supposedly make the devil spring out.
P&PM
An afternoon out
Jack and Jill are a pair of restored windmills that preside over the village of Clayton, in the Downs a couple of miles to the west. Jill is still in working order and occasionally produces stone-ground wholemeal flour. From the windmills you can see the ornate, castellated entrance to the Clayton railway tunnel, a Victorian folly in the shape of a Tudor fortress that has a small house in its centre. And why go to all the way to Italy for an art fix when you can see beautiful 12th-century frescoes right here in Clayton, in the church of St John the Baptist? P&PM
Green fingers?
In the other direction, West Dean Estate (westdean.org.uk) in Chichester, the former home of Edward James, patron of surrealists such as Salvador Dali, houses an art college and gardens open all year. The restored Victorian glasshouses are a gardener's delight.
Judith Nesbitt, chief curator at Tate Britain, who lives in the area
Pub walks
West Sussex is studded with picturesque pubs, and there's also a wonderful network of bridleways and public footpaths around the Sussex Weald in the north, the South Downs Way and the Downs Link – so it's easy to plan a route (or an excuse) that takes in one of these excellent watering holes. The website of The Ginger Fox (01273 857888), a couple of miles away in Albourne, conveniently details a bracing six-mile circular walk starting and finishing at the thatched pub. This will help you build up an appetite for its delicious, locally sourced food, including their own ice-cream. Further afield, The Blue Ship (01403 822709) in a hamlet called The Haven, near Billingshurst, serves beer straight from the barrel through two hatches. Its cosy front parlour dates back to the 15th century. You may be tempted to abandon the long walk and linger by the open fire or in its pretty garden.
JN
